A small team spent two years and the majority of the members' savings to do …

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Jamestown is a 2D, top-down shoot-em-up for the PC. It is $10 on Steam, and you should buy it. The story is simple: you play as Sir Walter Raleigh, and you're fighting your way through 17th century British Colonial... Mars?

"Sure, it's an absurd premise, but that's one of the nice things about being indie; if you want to make an alt-historical shooter set on 17th-century British colonial Mars (and starring Sir Walter Raleigh in his sixties), there's no one to tell you that you can't," Mike Ambrogi of Final Form games told Ars. It's not just the graphics and premise that are special though. The game has been in development for two years, and that time has been spent on polishing the experience to a blinding shine. If you placed this game on a Dreamcast disc and told me it was a lost Treasure release, I would have believed you.

The team was gracious enough to answer our questions about the game's development in detail, and the lessons to be learned are extensive: iterate endlessly, playtest constantly, and analyze what came before. The result is a shooter that feels fresh, while looking classical. Here's how they did it.

How it works

The game is designed to be played with up to four people on the same computer, and you can use keyboards, mice, or wired 360 controllers to control your ship. The respawn mechanic is brutal in its simplicity: if one player dies, the other has to stay alive for a set amount of time before the dead player is brought back. As you raise the difficulty level of the game, the amount of time it takes for the other player to respawn increases. This puts immense pressure on the surviving player, who also needs to keep their eyes open for respawn tokens that can bring the other player back from the dead instantly.

By collecting cogs that enemies drop, you also fill up your "Vaunt" meter. When this is filled you can activate a shield that offers protection from enemy bullets, and can also be used to protect the other players. Using your Vaunt power also increases the points you gain for killing the enemies, and used wisely will lead to much higher scores, not to mention an increased life expectancy.

The real thrills happen during boss bottles when one player is left fighting for survival, nothing left in their Vaunt meter, praying to make it through the swarm of bullets until the other player spawns. This is a game where white knuckles are the norm, not the exception.

It all works and feels great

While the mechanics sometimes subvert what you're used to from 2D shooters, the real surprise here is the level of polish and care put into every aspect of the game. It simply feels wonderful to play, and that's not an accident. "From the moment of our company's inception, we placed a very high value on the idea of craftsmanship," Ambrogi said. "We wanted every inch of our first game, every enemy, every button, every minute of gameplay, to feel hand-crafted and special."

The game features 45 unique enemies, six bosses, and the team actually built their own engine that allowed for fast iterations and prototyping. The game's mechanics and enemy placement were tweaked and adjusted and improved time after time before they found what works.

"We built our core technology around our core design/development philosophy, which is that rapid prototyping is the key to making good games," he said. "We knew, or at least believed, that we'd find better ideas the more iterations we could afford, so reducing the cost of iteration was a primary goal." This proved key, as they were able to run through a "frankly huge" number of bad ideas before they were able to find ideas and concepts they liked.

Jamestown

There was also the challenge of finding a way to make four-player co-op work in a shooter environment and have it feel unique to their game with the respawn and Vaunt system. The games they looked at for inspiration were far-flung, and included Left 4 Dead and Rock Band. Both gamers were far from the shooter genre, but they both had interesting ideas about how to bring your friends back from the dead. "Their influence is hopefully pretty easy to spot in Jamestown, from the timed respawn and 'Revive Token' system for bringing back dead teammates to the stacking Vaunt multipliers and 5-star high-level score representation," Ambrogi explained. "We think our game is pretty special, but it's definitely standing on the shoulders of giants in many respects."

Enemy placement as a scientific problem

After finishing the game I remarked that enemy placement was handled very well in Jamestown, and that in shooters this seemed to be more art than science. I was gently corrected.

"We were actually pretty scientific about it, believe it or not, though it's true that at the placement stage, there's a lot of horse-sense that comes into play," he said. They analyzed their favorite shooters, and timed things like the duration of levels and boss fights. They figured out how much time passed between new gameplay ideas in games like Ikaruga and Dondonpachi. "There's a good amount of stylistic variation between the classics of the genre, but trends do tend to emerge," Ambrogi said.

"The big idea, though, is that no enemy is an island. In most shooters, the 'family' of enemies in each level, and the way they attack you in a huge variety of combinations, is really the lion's share of the experience of playing that level; it quite literally is the gameplay," he continued. He also called even that level of design "useless" without constant playtesting, and in fact during the credits the largest amount of names are under the testing section. This wasn't an accident.

"We found that the best way to create a smooth level flow is to test the gameplay over and over, on your own and with blind testers, and think consciously about the intensity curve," Ambrogi said. "It's just impossible to overstate the value of playtesting. We were revisiting and tuning placements, health totals, movement speeds, and bullet patterns right up to the day of the gold master, because our clarity was constantly improving on what did and didn't work."

The music for the game is also incredible, and it goes a long way to creating the game's mood. The game was scored by a Chilean musician named Francisco Cerda who was "discovered" by the team when he began to play the piano in the house they were sharing. He later returned to Chile, but when no other musician measured up, he was tapped to provide music for the game.

"We worked together on the music for nearly 7 months," Tim Ambrogi, who is also a trained composer, told Ars. "Sometimes, he would score the level we had created, as was the case with the first half of Dark Sector. Other times, such as Croatoa, we built the level to match the music that he written for us." This wasn't a case of the score being laid on top of the gameplay, as the music was used as both the score and inspiration for the game at various points of development.

"When your goal is to provide your players with the most powerful and immersive experience possible, music must be a major focus," Tim explained. "This is especially true in a shooter, where you have very little time to synchronize the player's emotional state with the intensity of the game."

The lack of online multiplayer

One of the most glaring issues with the game is the lack of any kind of online multiplayer. If you want to play with your friends, you're going to have to invite them over and hook up multiple controllers. "This was absolutely a technical decision," Tim Ambrogi explained. "As anyone who has written an online multiplayer game knows, it can be an extremely expensive feature, and it is best implemented as-you-go from the very beginning of development."

The problem is that multiplayer is a very tricky thing in shooters, and this creates even more problems. "In particular, the shooter genre presents a fairly serious challenge, with as many as 4,000 fast-moving replicated objects, a need for very responsive controls, and gameplay where fast reaction times play a major role in the experience," he said. "An online version would need to employ extremely clever solutions to work around the limits of bandwidth, latency, and coherence. It would also require writing both server and client versions of much of the gameplay code, increasing the cost of gameplay iteration."

He stressed that he does believe it can be done, and done well, but it was simply too large a technical challenge for a game with such a small team focusing so heavily on the core gameplay, art, and music.

This is a must-play for fans of the genre

When Final Form games first contacted me about covering its game I was skeptical, but I invited a friend over with his laptop. We were disappointed when we realized co-op had to take place on the same screen, but I wanted to get a review ready so we soldiered on, and around four hours later we had beaten the campaign on the lowest possible difficulty.

It was an amazing ride, and there are still the higher difficulty levels to master, as well as a series of challenge missions to test your skill. While the game may seem like it lacks a large number of levels, the changes that occur when you increase the difficulty level, the bonus missions, and the different ships that all play differently do much to increase the replay value. For $10, this is a steal.

After talking to the team behind the game and seeing how much time, thought, and passion they poured into the game to achieve this level of quality, I was even more impressed. This is a confident, brilliant game, and for it to come from the indie scene and be released in such a well-honed form is even rarer.

"We knew we had made a game that we loved, but we really had no idea how the gaming press and the public at large would react," Hal Larsson of Final Form games told Ars. "It's been incredible watching professional writers really throw their shoulders into expressing exactly what they like about our game." They can add us to the list of fans, and after you buy the game, I think you'll feel the same.